Senate G.O.P. Releases Domestic Policy Bill With Deeper Cuts to Medicaid

Politics|Senate G.O.P. Releases Domestic Policy Bill With Deeper Cuts to Medicaid

Senate Republicans on Monday released legislation that would cut Medicaid far more aggressively than would the House-passed bill to deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda, while also salvaging or slowing the elimination of some clean-energy tax credits, setting up a fight over their party’s marquee policy package.

The measure, released by the Senate Finance Committee, contains the core provisions of that chamber’s version of the legislation that Republicans muscled through the House last month and are hoping to speed through the Senate and deliver to Mr. Trump's desk by July 4. But its differences with that bill are substantial and are all but certain to complicate the measure’s path to enactment, casting doubt on that timetable.

Most notably, the proposal would take a slower and less sweeping approach to phasing out clean-energy tax credits created during the Biden administration, and cover part of the cost of doing so by imposing deeper and more expansive cuts to Medicaid.

While the House measure would add a new work requirement to Medicaid for childless adults, the Senate proposal would expand its application to the parents of older children. It also would crack down even harder than the House bill on strategies that many states have developed to tax medical providers and pay them higher prices for Medicaid services.

In making the case for the bill, Republicans focused on another, far more politically popular element of the measure: its extension of tax cuts that were enacted in 2017 and are set to expire at the end of the year.

“This bill prevents an over-$4 trillion tax hike and makes the successful 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, enabling families and businesses to save and plan for the future,” Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said in a statement. “I look forward to continued coordination with our colleagues in the House and the administration to deliver President Trump’s bold economic agenda for the American people as quickly as possible.”